This is honestly the only major issue I have with the Fediverse. Most of my Reddit/social media posts are related to three or so niche interests. My first Mastodon account was on the central hub for one interest that later defederated with the central hub for another interest. Not being able to interact with 1/3rd of the people I want to interact with just defeats the whole point of joining these kinds of platforms. Moderators just carving out a chunk of the Fediverse for their users is just unacceptable.
Right, but how is it any different than half the users on a subreddit leaving and starting their own? People will always get together in groups and will always naturally begin to despise one another for whatever reason.
It sucks, but it’s just the way it is. If people don’t want to interact with one another, there’s no point in forcing them to do so.
I mean, honestly, this sounds like a good thing, because the system works. Isn't it kind of the point of the fediverse that if you don't like someone else's rules, you can do your own thing? They aren't beholden to your rules, and you aren't beholden to theirs either. That sounds to me like a great system where no one group of people or opinions can exert control over everyone else.
Servers defederating themselves from others with policies they don't agree with is pretty common, especially if those policies are considered problematic. But I don't know what to think about the fact I can't see Beehaw mods specifying any particular instances of issues stemmed from users of those two severs, and it seems like the only criteria for defederating was the size of those two servers.
But I guess they have the freedom to make whatever rules they want for their own sever.
@LollerCorleone What I understood was that the moderation was difficult now, due not only to the size of the instances but also with the fact that almost all the people were new and the communities are not stable yet.
Since they have a quite high moderation standard, I guess that now, with few resources and a fast grow, it is difficult to keep it. And this standard is a commitment to the own community, people joint the instance because of it.
Another issue to take in account is that the moderation tools are not enough to handle with the problems of big and heterogeneous social networks. If I understood, in Lemmy and Kbin the only possibilities are to be federated or not, but not something in between like in Mastodon (the silence option).
From what I have read it was about the difficulty moderating such a large userbase which is perfectly reasonable. The great thing about Lemmy is that anyone who disagrees can start their own server and run it however they want.
Are Beehaw some sort of gatekeepers? I mean if you don’t want any interaction outside of your own instance at all because you can’t handle it, why even create an instance on an federated network?
It would be nicer if account migration were possible so hopefully that becomes a thing someday
It would suck having your account on an instance for 2+years then all of a sudden moderators change and you no longer agree with the instance, but are now stuck there and have to go by the decisions the new mods make or make a new account somewhere else.
being safe and being open are somewhat detrimental to each other.
They choose to be less open, to be more safe.
Fine by me, but I'd expect them to turn into a LGBTQIA+ (is that the current one?) echo chamber before long.
And maybe I'll be wrong, and that'll be fine too.
Yeah I've definitely noticed a running set of themes in the posts that are most critical of this move and it's making me much more sympathetic to Beehaw's decision.
Assholes don't like being told they're not invited to the party. And the reasons they're not invited are... Well, things start to get recursive at this point.
Funny to me that people like you always complain about "safe spaces" in the same breath that you make it clear you can't handle something as irrelevant to you as someone's sexuality. That's projecting fragility. These aren't "safe spaces," they're just only allowing decent people who don't flip their shit when they find out what two consenting adults want to do with their bodies.
Uh.. that's unfortunate because many will just interpret it as federation being bad and will go back to reddit preaching against fedi.
That being said it could also be a reason for admins to have conversations about how to deal with these migrations and which moderation tools they need.
Uh.. that's unfortunate because many will just interpret it as federation being bad
IRC networks sometimes split. That didn't mean that they didn't generally stay together. Just that there were several major networks and a some isolated servers.
Usenet, as far as I know, generally remained one network, but occasionally saw Usenet Death Penalties.
XMPP supports federation, but organization, like businesses, exist that choose to use isolated XMPP servers.
I remember being on Usenet but at the time I think the average user would have little to no knowledge on how the system worked. You just had to choose a server after reading a few guides and there was no rush.
I like how federation works but right now people come here with different expectations and when it occurs in waves I think it's too stressful.
This is where federation works anyway. Whoever comes here making posts from an account with more real life authority has a lot more to lose.
The trade off is some random exec could post here but since they are @exec that’s just them (obviously with a small grain of salt).
Federation just means that you can interact with as much or as little real life as you want. Some random Karen from Wichita, KS could call you weak on her fully fleshed out life story profile on some weird anonymous hamburger helper support group.
I think we do need to keep letting this play out though. It’s a very interesting experiment. There are definitely problems that need to be solved going forward but I think this place will be fine.
Yeah, it's literally very early days. This is new, everyone here has just flooded in, and things need time to sort out and stabilise. There isn't a "system" that works for everyone yet. We'll see new instances getting popular, drama and controversy, and so forth. That's normal on the internet.
Reading their rationale, yes, I think there's a very good chance they'll defederate kbin.social as well, sooner or later, regardless of how moderation here works.
some of the first posts i see on kbin from other instances are about a major defederation lol. not ideal since this is happening when the fediverse is growing... but I suppose this is the intent behind the fediverse.
"I think it's easy to take this personally but I think it's more about the moderation tools in Lemmy not being adequate at the moment so this is the best bandaid solution for now. We need to quickly put effort into developing better moderation tools like limiting other servers without fully defederating, limiting specific communities, forcing nsfw on communities/instances, proxying reports to origin servers so admins have better feedback on their instance user's bad behavior, and many other things if we want to prevent defederating like this from being the only option.
I think infighting about this decision and differing moderation styles instead of focusing together on moderation challenges and tooling deficiencies risks tearing the community / federation apart and is counterproductive to the goal of being better than reddit."
Their stance on some things is maybe a bit too drastic for some, but they already have one of the largest communities for certain topics like gaming (at least last I checked), so we may lose out on the content that would help people stay long-term, which is sad.
What's with you defending everything bit of criticism towards beehaw?
Regardless, no, Beehaw used to have a "No sources" rule that was established after users kept questioning the moderators there. I mean shit, their modlog is public, you can just look it up yourself.
People should stop looking at where the biggest community is. Are you an actor or a spectator? Start creating content in your own instance. This is what killed reddit, too much spectators, all sharing the same on-liner jokes. Do you have an interesting take about a videogame? Then share it. Write things down.
I did that on beehaw but got banned lol. I commented about my experience with someone calling me a british cigarette, but then got banned because I said it (even though it was on topic and the thread was asking about lgbtq experiences)
That is an ideal take, however what i think make large community and a upvote or downvote system like reddit interesting is that with volume, good idea and disccusion is more likely to occurs. why did we go to forum anyway. i think it is to find different opinion and interesting disccusion and what other think of our opinion. If we just want to share our own opinion or take on something, a blog would do better.
Discussions involve back-and-forths, and require the ability to actually focus on another person. There's no focusing when there are 20,009 comments and everyone is just mindlessly scrolling past the top 200 before moving to another post.
I signed up for Lemmy.World because that was the only one open a few days ago. Does that mean I need to create a separate account on Beehaw to view their stuff now? Why does this stuff have to be so complicated? Is Lemmy actually a viable Reddit alternative or not?
from what I understand.. each instance is like a country and the Beehaw government just banned passports to/from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works. Citizens can hold dual citizenship but getting beehaw citizenship will have higher requirements. kbin is also open sign-up but not banned because it's users are more chill for some reason.
You know how some subreddits would ban you if you posted in another one? That's basically all this is. We're on lemmy.world which is less guarded, so we're lumped in with troublemakers.
Just like with reddit, the solution is to make a new account without affiliation to the defederated groups. There's a bajillion smaller lemmys out there that will likely never get defederated, and it makes the most sense to have one of those be your home vs the largest instances, now that we can see this kind of problem will occur.
The beehaw admins have stated their hopeful end goal would be a federation whitelist, rather than the current blacklist format. So even if you were to make you own / join a smaller instance it seems like beehaw's entire goal is to be walled off from most instances.
Not trying to argue with you as you are correct as far as i see it....
Having a whitelist federation List would be worse in my opinion cause it would effectively kill the whole "everyone can start his own small instance". It would be a whole lot of work if every small instance has to get approval from the bigger instances to federate with them. And for the bigger instances to process all applications for federation.
No I completely agree, it's entirely a weird and almost backwards move to be on a federated platform and then seemingly have your goals be at odds with the concept of federation with the majority of the platform.
And while I believe that, as an outside observer, it's also important to realize that from the beehaw admin's perspective they accidentally went from "dozens" to "tens of thousands" of users over the course of a few days.
At the end of the day it's their site and they can do with it as they please, but I feel bad for all the users who were inadvertently guided there by the lemmy homepage listing them at the top, only to be at this weird crossroads now.
Like I said in another reply though, I just mostly feel bad for the tens of thousands of users who were inadvertently driven there by the site being near / at the top of the list of instances on the lemmy homepage, and now have to figure out if they need to make another account somewhere else.
But in reality it's not like any of the majority of new users could possibly have so much of a "oh no all my posts!" moment if they really felt like they wanted to switch lol.
That is a very good point. I'm such a situation the only two choices are to make their community your home and play by their rules (what many of us just left Reddit over) or ignore it and interact with the content and communities you can.
okay by their rules (what many of us just left Reddit over)
People are leaving Reddit over their moderation rules? I thought the CEO did something with the API.
But I mean, yeah, people who have compatible instance rules will federate and the people on those instances will have agreed to those rules. I think you might be overestimating how restrictive typical rules are, unless you think transphobia being called "not okay" is too restrictive.
Does that mean I need to create a separate account on Beehaw to view their stuff now?
If you're subscribed to any communities on @beehaw.org, then yes. After defederation, none of the new content from there will appear on your lemmy.world account and vice versa - people at @beehaw.org won't see your posts on lemmy.world.
Why does this stuff have to be so complicated?
This is how fediverse works. There's no "central place", there's currently 333 Lemmy servers. Each of them is free to take their own decisions regarding moderation and who they want to exchange content with. I know it probably feels complicated compared to centralized approach, but that's the core of these federated services. It's not different from Reddit subs banning users for posting in other subs.
Is Lemmy actually a viable Reddit alternative or not?
I guess time will tell, but if the Twitter meltdown-migration is a reference, then no - majority of people will go back to Reddit after the blackouts are over (I guess today).
This will never be Reddit, and that's good because as you can see Reddit fucks up bad.
I could ask similar questions to reddit admins/ceo.
Why are you killing the app I use to browse reddit?
Why do I have to install a different app that's slower and riddled with ads?
Why are you making this change that I don't like?
Okay this is what I've gathered so far, someone please correct me, Lemmy is one type of instance on the fediverse when they were federated with beehaw they would see beehaw posts and vice versa. This is no longer the case, as far as I understand it you can still go to beehaw and create an account to browse it but you won't have access from your Lemmy account. IMHO this makes sense to me, it's like an entire sub going private.
Beehaw is an instance of Lemmy with a bunch of subs inside it. So it's not like a sub going silent. It's a big chunk of the Lemmy user base and their subs being cut off from a couple other large chunks of the user base and their subs (and vice versa), if I understand correctly.
Just to clarify, Lemmy is the software that the servers are running. People will call a server running Lemmy an "instance" of Lemmy. You can create an account on any instance but you're bound by the rules of that instance's admins and mods.
Have you tried it out just in the browser? Kbin's mobile interface is pretty great. Also if you use Safari or Firefox you can very easily "install" the webpage as an "app", or use something like Native Alpha to do the same thing (but I think most mobile browsers offer this feature.)
Interesting. I support their right to make that decision and I'm glad that's an option in the Fediverse. I'm not sure I'd want to see that change happening if I were a member of their instance (I haven't spent enough time there to have an informed opinion about the alleged problems they cite in the post), but I suppose the strength of federation is that users can choose to move to another instance without necessarily losing access to Beehaw's content. I wonder how this will play out among their userbase?
Most support it, although not all. They’ve been clear ask asking that they were trying to build a well-moderated space so it aligns With why most people are there - saw one person say that their first post had been hit by right-wing trolls from one of those instances, so if that’s happening then defederation makes sense.
I'm a Beehaw member; also a kbin member, but I wasn't able to get on here until tonight because it had been so laggy a few days ago that I'd given kbin up as unusable. To answer your question, I don't like it but I do understand it. It sounds from what they've said that they basically had no choice; they were overwhelmed.
That said, I'm now VERY glad that I have a kbin account. I just re-created my subscription list (including magazines from both of the banned instances) here. I just hope kbin isn't going to ban them too?
And just in case anyone is wondering: I expect to keep using both Beehaw and kbin (and my other Fediverse accounts, for that matter; I'm on Mastodon, BookWyrm, and Paper.wf). It's nice to have a low-stress refuge like Beehaw sometimes But I want to be able to access the whole wide world when I choose, too!
If you don't mind, would you explain why you have bookwyrm and paper.wf since you have mastodon?
What makes those different in your experience? (just looking them up didn't give me much of a real feel.) I have mastodon and kbin right now since they're both different.
It's easiest to compared them to their non-fedi equivalents.
Twitter (Mastodon), Goodreads (Bookwyrm) and Medium (Write Freely) offer users different experiences, UI's and tools.
I never really cottoned to Mastodon, possibly for the same reasons I never took to Twitter. Perhaps I'm just too much of a chatterbox to accept their post length limitations. 😆
Bookwyrm is outstanding for book reviews, and it allowed me to import the CSV of my reviews from GoodReads. If Mastodon can do that, I wasn't aware of it.
Paper.wf was recommended to me as a Fediverse boxing site. Mastodon is too short-form for me. Beehaw doesn't seem to have a personal blog as an option. BookWyrm, oddly enough, does - and I just discovered that I can see my BookWyrm blog (called "Direct Messages" there, which really doesn't make sense) from kbin. I have no idea how that works, since my accounts are separate.
Paper.wf is elegant, but seemingly skimpy on features, though. Currently I can't figure out how to find other blogs there or follow them, and as far as I can tell there's no way for anybody to comment on blog entries there. If anyone wants to check out my blog there, here it is. Maybe you can tell me how to comment on entries!
Thanks for writing about this I saw your recent post as well, these changes are interesting and I can only imagine we're going to see more changes in the future. It seems you're posting from @BobQuasit, but that's the great thing about it, you could just have easily posted from @BobQuasit. 😂
the admin here hasn't made any mention of blocking instances. and something tells me he's not interested in doing so. so for kbin's side of things it's probably fine. but we might get blocked by beehaw as well. I doubt kbin will block lemmy.world.
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